Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) cable networks are used to provide an increasingly complex and bandwidth-intensive variety of services, including multimedia entertainment streaming, 100+ Mbps speeds for data services, and support for multiscreen services. An HFC cable network may provide a high speed communication link between one or more client devices, such as cable modems, and a head-end device, such as a Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) device (e.g., to a radio frequency (RF) input port of a head-end device). These communication links may utilize a long loop Automatic Level Control (ALC) system to individually adjust each client device's transmit power level for adaptation to location-specific network characteristics such that each modem is received at the head-end device at a target power level.
A client device may be unable to transmit at the desired power level for a variety of reasons. As a result, the head-end device may receive a signal from such client device at a power level lower or higher than the target level. consequently The head-end device may receive a signal suffering from degradation and errors. For example, one the one hand, when the received signal level is below the target level, thermal noise and/or quantization noise may disrupt the received signal. On the other hand, when the received signal is above the target level, signal errors may arise from clipping and/or intermodulation distortion.